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Be a researcher for an evening on European researchers’ night, Friday 24 September

16 Sep 2010

Geneva, 16 September 2010. On Friday 24 September, CERN1 will be one of 260 European locations involved in the 5th edition of the European Researchers’ Night, an initiative funded by the European Union’s Science and Society programme aimed at highlighting the appeal of being a researcher and promoting scientific research among young Europeans. CERN is taking part in the BEST project - Being a European Scientist Today – organized in partnership with project coordinator, Frascati Scienza2, the Erasmus Medical Centre3 in Rotterdam and EFDA-JET4.

In keeping with previous editions of the event, scientific research will be presented to the public in an engaging and original way. In Frascati, the entire city with its historical buildings provides the location for an intense programme including science cafés, concerts, debates with scientists and interactive exhibitions, along with visits to the numerous laboratories based in the area, for an entire week starting on September 18 and culminating on the Researchers’ Night.

During the night, a rich parallel programme will engage the public in Frascati, Rotterdam and Geneva from 17:00CEST to 01:00 the following morning. At CERN, some 150 young students from local schools will be given the opportunity to sit side by side with scientists and operators in the LHC accelerator and detectors’ control rooms, experiencing the excitement of research at the high-energy frontier with the world’s most powerful particle accelerator.

The main focus of this 5th edition will be international networking, demonstrated through a live webcast – the Globe Show. From 17:00 to 01:00, the Globe Show will come live from CERN’s Globe of Science and Innovation, Frascati’s main square, the JET laboratory and the Erasmus Medical Centre. The Globe Show will bring together scientists involved with the latest advancements in particle physics, astrophysics, medicine and research on new forms of energy, thanks to an unprecedented network of high-quality teleconferences put together by Tandberg for the project partners. Audiences at all the project’s locations will be able to ask questions of physicists in the control rooms at CERN, scientists from the Ice Cube experiment at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica, Nobel laureate Sam Ting at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, where he is preparing the AMS detector for its journey to the International Space Station, and ESA astronaut Roberto Vittori.

Among the highlights of the webcast is the participation of Nobel Laureate Georges Smoot, (Physics 2006), who will relate how research into the infinitesimally small, such as particle physics at the LHC, is intimately connected to cosmology, the science of the infinitely large.

All the sites involved will keep their permanent exhibitions and visitor centres open until midnight.

Footnote(s)

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world's leading laboratory for particle physics. It has its headquarters in Geneva. At present, its Member States are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Romania is a candidate for accession. Israel is an Associate Member in the pre-stage to Membership. India, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United States of America, Turkey, the European Commission and UNESCO have Observer status.